Still under the ''Preclear'' operation after 21 hours!!!  Everything looks good.  I'm in the ''Post-Read'' stage (64%).

 

I can believe I have to do that for all of my drives  :'(

 

Yes - preclear for 2 TB drive should take 24 hours or more.

Yes - you don't have to (but is is very good idea) to do that for all of your drives (you can preclear up to 6 drives at the same time - I just did not tell you as you will have to fix your hardware problems first and you will need to use the remaining two drives for checking )

 

Once the preclear is done you will have to do few things.

 

1. Check the BIOS of your motherboard - there are two different hardware revisions hence two different BIOSes and they both fix "support new AMD SB850 version".

The south bridge is where your six native SATA ports are attached and if your current BIOS was buggy this may have caused the extremely slow HD speed.

So you will have to check your motherboard hardware revision (it is either 2.0 or 2.1), download the appropriate BIOS and flash it (the manual should have a nice description on how to do this).

 

On the first try leave the speed of these ports to 6Gbits but change the mode to AHCI. Use one of the remaining disks inside the Norco case and test the speed of the preclear - if it is above 110 MB/s you problems have gone away. Use Alt-F2 to Alt-F6 to open another console(s), login and run the preclear for the remaining disks.

 

If your speed is still low cancel the preclear and try to change the port used from the reverse breakout cable (not sure why you said your cable is C-SFF8087-D as this is SFE8087 to SFE8087 cable) - you have to go thru all four of them. If the slow speed persist move the HD to another backplane and try again.

 

If still slow lower the speed to SATA2 on the six native ports, AHCI mode and try again the procedure above until you get a good speed - once again the WD20EARS should start the preread with over 110 MB/s.

 

Awesome, thanks for those tips!

 

I will pass throught those steps during the weekend and post my results.

 

Cheers 

Hello Joe,

 

Please find attached my Preclear results for my first WD20EARS (finally!).

 

As you can see, I got some errors.  Do I have to worry about it?

 

Thx

Not for what is on the picture. Check your syslog for all the details - you may want to copy and save it for reference.

 

 

Hello Joe,

 

Here are the results from my tests.

 

At this time, I have the same speed using the Norco SATA cable (fan) with the backplane case or a regular SATA cable.  I flash my BIOS with the latest sofware and tried several configuration in the BIOS.

 

The best speed I can have is between 90MB/s to 104 MB/s at the begining of the Preclear operation and this, doing Preclear on 4 HD drives at the same time.

 

So the good news is the Norco cable and/or the backplanes are not the problem.

 

Maybe I have a wrong setting in my BIOS.  Could be nice to find somebody using the same motherboard under UnRAID.

 

Now I have 7 HD done with Preclear (will be done in an hour). 

 

Do you suggest to stay with 4.5.6 or go with version 5?

 

Thanks!

Hello Joe,

 

Here are the results for my 4 WD20EARS under Preclear operation.

 

Disk 1 looks perfect but got errors on the 3 others. 

 

Do you see a problem for disk 2 to 3?

 

Cheers!

 

Jean-Martin

Results for disk 2

Results for disk 3

Finally, results for disk 4

Results for disk 2

 

Disk 2 is fine. It renormalized the values, but in each case the Current Value does not exceed the Threshold Limit.

Results for disk 3

 

Disk 3 is fine. The values were renormalized, and the Current Value does not exceed the Threshold Limit.

Finally, results for disk 4

 

Disk 4 is fine. It renormalized the values, but in each case the Current Value does not exceed the Threshold Limit.

 

Just about the only SMART sections dealing with errors where there is a human readable RAW VALUE (last column in the report) is Pending Sector Reallocation and Reallocation Events.

Thanks Joe!

 

Now I will start Unraid with 3 hard drive, copy the files on each drive and I will simulate a drive failure.

 

I will make a jump too to the Pro version.

 

Thanks for all

Thanks Joe!

 

Now I will start Unraid with 3 hard drive, copy the files on each drive and I will simulate a drive failure.

 

I will make a jump too to the Pro version.

 

Thanks for all

You can simulate a drive failure by disconnecting a drive, or, if you do not want to open up the case, un-assigning a drive will also simulate its failure.

 

When you re-assign it and Start the array it will be re-constructed from the others.   

 

Joe L.